41–50 of 73 posts
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" I was laid off from a very well paying job and to support my family I had to take up a worse paying job with similar problems to the one you described. Yes. Ive had dark thoughts sometimes. I dont know the answer. It helps to distance oneself and treat the dark thoughts passively, as in if I wasnt in this situation these ideas would not be coming to me, or something l…
The only way to cope is to only deliver the minimum, and not care too much about it. This is risky as there is a chance that the minimum delivery and no care attitude could filter into other areas of your life.
Luckily for me, I was able to find a job soon after.
tbh I envy your position, you have a real opportunity to blow people away showing them what real modernization looks like. Like Prometheus bringing fire to humans. I don’t understand why you haven’t just let an AI agent do all the tasks your incompetent coworkers take months to do.
I empathize. Deeply. I’ve experienced severe anxiety as well, and very high stress due an environment where I felt powerless. What saved me (in no particular order) 1. Sport. I felt I was “burning” my stress and anxiety by doing 1h of sport a day, in nature. 2. Therapy 3. Family and friends, quality time 4. Find another job 5. Stop social media 6. Fixed sleep schedule
>when we have to meet with customers and mention that modernization and system integrations are our top priority according to the management team, yet we can't even ship a few GET endpoints after six months of work... If the company pays to do a project where nothing happens for six months and it keeps paying, they are probably okay with a result, otherwise they would listen to your constructive proposals on how to i…
In the past I would've given the majority of my "brain power" to just work, and while I have enjoyed that at certain points when I've learnt a lot, I feel like it is not great for mental health and well-roundedness long term. Especially as you say caring about something you don't own where more work =/= more gain.
If you don't mind me saying this, one thing that gets overlooked often in situations like the one you explained is that the team is part of the system that needs modernisation . In fact, the team needs to lead the modernisation effort. It needs updating before the rest of the system can be. From your explanation it sounds like you expected to find a modern and skilled team maintaining a legacy project. That is not at…
I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before. Finally after mo…
Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.
The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.
What to do:
a) First and foremost: make finding your next opportunity your full-time job, above and beyond your present full-time job. And take the time to build your professional footprint for your next opportunity too. Let me explain: do you have an online portfolio of your work? If no, start one right now, and maintain it forever. Do you have a blog where you talk about your market/industry/profession; which existing tools are best of breed, which ones can be improved, and which ones are missing? How AI is affecting your market/industry/profession? Publish white papers and case studies. How's your GitHub?
b) Secondly use this opportunity as a training ground for Life. This is Life at its finest, what will make the difference will be your reactions and responses to these events. Read about the ancient Stoics (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero), Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli (very misunderstood), Jung. Make this the most consequential job of your Life.
c) Related to b) above, tweak your language paying special attention to the language you use. Just from your title, "Survive" and "hate" are problematic words. Read Shane Parrish's works.
I am not saying that it's easy, quite the opposite. Think of this job as a short-term problem and you are building a long-term solution that will take care of this and much more. In order to be successful, you will need to change your worldviews, your belief systems, and imprints.
I wish you a lot more then dumb luck.
Most of the work I have done will be thrown away after 5-10 years (I have written some really nicely optimised software, that worked perfectly and companies have just thrown it in the bin because of management doesn't appreciate this). So I've given up caring.